Category DASIA Presentations

The importance of the quality of requirements for
successful execution and completion of a project from a
technical and contractual point of view is being
recognized more and more. Many methods are targeted
to improve the support for collecting requirements
while still focusing on natural language. However, the
ambiguities in the semantics of natural language are the
biggest obstacles towards success. The approach
presented in this paper focuses on the elements of a
domain while keeping the expressiveness of natural
names and terms and introducing clear semantics. This
brings the advantage that immediate verification of the
human-provided inputs is possible, immediate
contributions to validation are available and
inconsistencies can be detected by a tool immediately.
This leads to guidance of an engineer by a tool towards
consistent, complete and correct requirements -
requirements of high quality - and eases maintenance
for the same reasons. As most of the complexity is
handled by the tool due to its good knowledge on the
domain, the approach is scalable towards large
specifications. Several examples of application domains
are described which illustrate the universality and
feasibility of the approach across domain boundaries.

Various strategies for fault identification exist - e.g.
based on formal analysis of code or on testing - of
which each focuses on certain identification aspects and
fault types. This paper characterises the strengths and
weaknesses of methods â in theory and practice -
focusing on application-independent identification
strategies, and it suggests strategies to maximise the
number of detected faults while minimising the related
effort. Fault activation conditions are discussed in
detail, resulting in an extended scope on stimulation
needs. In particular, the contribution of automation in
raising the activation probabilities is investigated.
Various examples of fault activation mechanisms and
statistics on fault types vs. identification methods are
provided as observed in practice. An interesting result is
the identification of application-dependent test cases by
application-independent test strategies.

Certification is based on compliance of the code of the
code generator with given standards. Such compliance
never can guarantee correctness of the whole chain
through transformation down to the environment for
execution, though the belief is that certification implies
well-formed code at a reduced fault rate.

The approach presented here goes a direction different
from manual certification.. It is guided by the idea of
automated proof: each time code is generated from a
model the properties of the code when being executed in
its environment are compared with the properties
specified in the model. This allows to conclude on the
correctness of the whole chain for every application and
related generated code.

The intention of this paper is to highlight the benefits of
model exchange between different tools, methods and
notations on one side, and to identify issues of proper
modelling on the other side which have been detected
during model transformation and code generation from
models.

As the test effort takes a significant part of the software
development lifecycle, efficient test strategies are a precondition
for reduction of development costs and time.
In this respect two main issues exist: firstly, the tuning
of the test track from test case identification to
evaluation, secondly, the reduction of number of test
cases to be processed and evaluated. Both aspects were
considered in the work presented in this paper.

This paper was presented at the DASIA 2006 conference in Berlin, Germany.
It lays out principal approaches for tackling the "small target" and "oracle" problems in statistical automatic testing by applying deterministic methods for assistance.

This paper was presented at the DASIA 2005 conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.
It shows the result of an Automated ISVV (AISVV) activity executed on the
Flight Application Software (FAS) of the Autonomous Transfer Vehicle (ATV).

This paper was presented at the DASIA 2004 conference in Nice, France.
The answer to this hypothetic question is "yes", of course. The paper will
approach the problem in two steps: firstly, we will discuss if and which
measures exist to identify an overrun early enough, secondly, we will analyse
the sources of overruns and which means may be applied not to exceed the
planned budget.

This paper was presented during the DASIA'98 conference, May 25th-28th 1998 in
Athens. It shows BSSE's experience with the use of
(Commercial-)Off-The-Shelf-Software based on a project dealing with the
integration of a number of (C)OTS packages and software developed from scratch.